


A Past Tense of Drowned

by grandilloquism



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Community: rs_games, Death, Drowning, Gore, Happy Ending, Horror, M/M, R/S Games 2016, Violence, return from the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-12
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-20 04:36:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8236310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grandilloquism/pseuds/grandilloquism
Summary: Sirius, six weeks dead, was standing on Remus’ doorstep. He was barefoot, in Muggle clothes, and drenched from his tangle of black hair to the soles of his muddy feet. He was terribly alive, and painfully young. Remus walked forward, drinking in the sight of him. He was pale and wide-eyed, and he looked to be no older than sixteen. “Sirius,” he said, just a whisper.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: #46 - "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot

Remus woke from a dream he was drowning. He was sweat soaked and shivering, and he fought his way out of the blankets, tearing the sheet and tumbling off onto the floor before he could get a breath into his lungs. His head was spinning and his throat burned, and there were tears in his eyes.

He coughed and rolled onto his side, cradling his head in his arms and bringing his breathing back under control. The house was quiet around him, empty, and his breath wheezed and stuttered for long minutes before the ache in his chest eased. Empires rose and fell in a shorter span than it took Remus to get upright and when he managed it, the blood pounding in his ears, but for the grace of his bedframe he would have gone right back down again.

He pushed off the bed to the door, and let the wall support him as he stumbled across the hall to the bath. The light brightened as he entered, and he was confronted with his own face, drawn and pale, in the mirror over the sink; he gestured rudely at it.

The revivifying potion in the cabinet was usually for late nights on Order business, or else early after full moon mornings, but it wasn’t a stranger to this purpose, either. It was icy, with a taste like aniseed and ginger that numbed at first, but then sent a thrumming warmth through Remus’ body that eased his muscles and stood him steadier on his feet. He followed it down with several handfuls of cold water from the tap, then pressed his wet hands full onto his face. He sighed, letting himself for just one moment, one moment in the privacy of his own washroom, feel what he had seen on the faces of so many for the last month—defeat, loss, grief—then put himself back together and went to make a cup of tea.

The household chores kept his body busy and his mind blank. It had been his parent’s cottage, before it was his, and his grandparent’s, before that. He had been lectured, often, as a child about the personal satisfaction he should feel that a hundred years of Lupins had scrubbed the same floors and washed dishes at the same sink, and it seemed just as much shit at thirty as it had at thirteen.

Dawn was marked by the lightening of the sky from inky black to mere slate, as rain fell in a desultory mist. The hens were warm and dry when Remus went out to check on them, and he pulled a half dozen eggs from their hay before scattering corn for the drowsing birds. The sheep, two ewes and a yearling, were huddled, damp and softly bleating, under the tin roof of their shelter. Remus paused by their fence, taking a moment to rub at their fuzzy black faces and breathing in the heavy smell of wet wool. It eased the memory of the dream from him.

The rain began to pick up, blowing to and fro as it was gusted about by the wind. It had been a miserable summer, for a list of reasons that seemed to grow longer each day, and Remus wrapped his coat more tightly about himself as he made his way back, the basket of eggs tucked in at his elbow.

It was something of a trudge up the path from the sheep’s meadow to the house. Remus took it briskly, stomping through puddles is muck boots that had sat at the back door for as far back as Remus’ memory stretched. He was at the gate to the back garden when he saw him. It wasn’t a silhouette Remus could ever mistake. His heart clenched painfully in his chest and his stomach felt sick with adrenalin. He clutched the gate, white-knuckled, and pushed it open, measuredly. The loud scrape of its hinges as it opened caught Sirius’ attention, and as he turned his head the lamp at the door shone full on his face.

“Moony?” Sirius asked, an obvious question in his voice.

Sirius, six weeks dead, was standing on Remus’ doorstep. He was barefoot, in muggle clothes, and drenched from his tangle of black hair to the soles of his muddy feet. He was terribly alive, and painfully young. Remus walked forward, drinking in the sight of him. He was pale and wide-eyed, and he looked to be no older than sixteen. “Sirius,” he said, just a whisper.

“Where—what’s happening? Remus? Where am I?”

Remus shook himself. Regardless of what was happening nothing would come of him falling apart over it. He went up the steps to the door and ushered Sirius through it. “The universe is playing at silly buggers, is what’s happening. As for where you are,” he moved around Sirius, leaving a wide berth between them, and going for the kettle, “you’re in my kitchen.” He shot a look over his shoulder as he filled the kettle, “You don’t recognize it?”

Sirius had only just come over the doorstep, and he seemed as unable to look away from Remus as Remus was him. “I’ve never been here,” he said, casting but a cursory look around the kitchen before his eyes went back to Remus. “Have I?”

Sirius had spent eleven days at Remus’ the previous summer, as long as it had taken Dumbledore to decree the house at Grimmauld Place inhabitable. “<i> _You </i>_ haven’t,” Remus said, with distinct emphasis.

He was not slow to catch on. “I haven’t.”

Remus let that hang in the air as he prepared the tea and took cups down from the cupboard. The rain beat against the roof, and the wind blew in the eaves. It made the room seem very small, contained, as if it were its own world, separate from the rest, and they two the only people in it.

“How,” Sirius broke the silence. “How does something like this happen? How does—how would one even manage something like this?” He looked at Remus searchingly.

Remus brought the tea to the table and gestured Sirius to sit; he dripped a trail of water behind him as he moved to comply. Remus cast a drying charm over him and went to poke up the fire in the grate. “How old are you,” he asked, turning to take his seat at the table. He, as he had so often before, in so many varied circumstance, ignored the annoyed twitch of Sirius’ brow.

“Seventeen,” he replied, his voice cool.

Remus looked at him. His hair, long enough to trail his collarbones, had fluffed from Remus’ charm, and a warm tone had returned to his skin. He sipped at his tea, casting his memory back. “No,” he said. “No, you cut your hair, at the beginning of sixth year. James pretended to cry for a week, every time he saw you.”

A sly smile spread across Sirius’ face. “You can’t blame a bloke for trying, Moony.”

“You?” Remus shot back, “Always.”  

“I’m sixteen,” Sirius said. “Recently turned. What does it matter?”

“I’m not sure,” Remus admitted. “But don’t you want to find out?”

///

Sirius was drowning. Eternally. There was no frame of reference for his existence, just the water, cold on his skin, burning in his lungs, and the endless, directionless pull of his body. There was no room in him for anything he had been before, and no hope for there to be anything after, only the water.

Until there wasn’t. The first breath Sirius took after dying was sweeter than any moment of his life that had come before. He was crumpled on the ground, his robes tangled around him, coughing weakly into the dirt. He struggled to sit up, pushing up from the ground, and felt the blood immediately rush from his head. Spots danced at the edges of his vision and he dug his fingers into the earth under him, clinging to consciousness.

The rustle of footsteps through grass beat out the pounding of his heart in his ears. He looked up.

///

Walburga Black stood naked in her garden. Her skin was red and chapped from the cold and she held a messy pulp of viscera in her blood-streaked hands. She had stood thus for three nights, and this, the last night of her vigil, she had begun to give up hope. It was her placenta she held in her hands, offered up to any spirt that might come to bless the birth of her firstborn son.

It was an old ritual, out of favour among most and not half Dark—blood magic at it’s very core, a promise exchanged for a price. Orion had tried to discourage her from it, but still he had waited at the door the last two mornings, wrapping her up warmly and chafing the life back in her filthy hands. If she did not succeed this night, the last night of the waning moon, there would be no other chance.

An unnatural chill grabbed at her spine. It wrapped its way into her bones and dusted her hair in frost. Walburga’s heart stuttered in her chest. The figure of a woman appeared in front of her, pale and white-haired, cloaked in shadows. The proportions of her body were wrong, long and eerie, and preternaturally slender. She looked Walburga over, eyes two black pits, and exposed the uneven rows of her sharp teeth in a smile. “You have something for me,” she said, her voice soft and hoarse.

Walburga squared her shoulders, lifting her chin high. “I offer you a bargain, an exchange—blood of my blood, given in return for the safety of my son.”

The spirit stalked closer, “You offer this to me?”

“I do.”

She was directly in front of Walburga now, and she could see into the fathomless depths of the creature’s eyes, like deep water. “You offer me this bargain, freely made, of your own will?”

“I do.”

“Then it is done. Our bargain, thrice made, blood for the protection of blood.” Her fingers were black, from the long pointed nails to the first knuckle, and she reached out to wrap them around Walburga’s hands, lifting them, and the afterbirth, to her mouth. She ate. It was gruesome to see and the creature was ungentle with her teeth, tearing Walburga’s skin. When it was done she said, “Take me to the babe.”

The house was a shock of warmth after spending the night outside. Her nose began to drip and her extremities burned as the blood pumped through them once more. She limped as she led the spirit upstairs.

Sirius was fussing in his cot. Walburga went to him, smoothing the soft down of his hair and crooning sweet nonsense.

“Allow me,” the spirit said, and, against all her instincts, Walburga stepped back. The woman skimmed the back of her nails over the tender skin of Sirius’ cheek, chanting lowly until he stilled, then slept. As she spoke Walburga felt something in her own self grow quiescent. She tried to resist it, to push against the stillness growing in her mind, but the moment she recognized it, it had already taken her over.

She stood, unconcerned, as the woman brought her hand up to her gore-stained mouth and cut her fingers on her teeth. She stood, unseeing, as the woman nudged her bleeding finger at the soft bow of Sirius’ mouth and, reflexively, he suckled. Long minutes passed as the woman kept up her creaking, crooning song, as Sirius drank at her blood and Walburga stood, unknowing.

When the spell broke it was as if rising from a deep sleep. Walburga startled to consciousness, unsure of what had passed. “What have you done?” she asked, her voice hoarse. She lunged across the room, her eyes searching out Sirius for any harm that might have been done to him, but he was untouched, dozing in his cot. Walburga clutched at the spirit’s wrist, “What have you done?”

“What you asked,” she replied. “No more.” And she was gone.

///

“But what can it hurt?” Sirius asked him, the edge of a whine in his voice. His face was propped in his hands in a pose of exhaustion, as if the last twenty minutes of trying to talk details out of Remus had proven too much for him.

Remus was easing eggs into boiling water. “Everything,” he said. “Very simply—everything.”

“But _your_ Sirius,” he said, “he’s never mentioned this? He didn’t know?”

Remus was extremely unwilling to tell this Sirius, young and yet unburdened by life, anything about the future in store for him, and if he could pass it off as a desire to be delicate about the situation they found themselves in, he would leap at the opportunity. “If he knew this was going to happen, he never mentioned it to me.”

Sirius huffed a breath. “I suppose I should have expected that fifty-year-old Remus could only be more Remus-ly than his past self.”

This surprised a laugh out of him. “Fifty!” he repeated, cutting a look back over at Sirius to see him smirking. He clocked what Sirius was doing but couldn’t see the harm in it. “I am thirty-six, I’ll have you know. Allow me my youth, please.”

“I think that ship’s sailed, mate.”

Remus ignored him, taking out the knife to cut bread and waiting out the inevitable.

It didn’t take long for Sirius to do the math. “So I’ve been displaced twenty years?”

“Something like that,” Remus agreed. He stared into the pot of boiling eggs, and a thought occurred. “It wasn’t the rain, was it?” he asked. “When you were at the door. I thought you were wet from the rain, but you were soaked through when you came in, not like you’d gotten rained on at all.” Another thought, almost forgotten to time, trailed on the heels of the first: Sirius had suffered from terrible nightmares up until early in their fifth year. A mainstay of their dormitory for years had been late-night, wand-lit buffoonery as they each tried to cheer Sirius up after he woke screaming. “You had the nightmare.”

Sirius’ face shuttered. “It was the drowning dream,” he admitted. “I fell asleep at James’ and woke up with my nose in your parsnips. I don’t know how long I was there, but I was already wet when I came to.”

Remus hadn’t passed the kitchen garden on his way out to the chicken house. He thought about it as he fished the eggs back out of the water. What was the most likely scenario? Sirius fell asleep in 1975 and woke up in 1996, wet to the bone after a dream about drowning. The same dream he had shared with Remus, twenty years apart. It was not a great leap of deduction to assume these things were related but Remus did not possess the pieces to put the rest of it together. “Was it different, in any way?” he asked.

Sirius pressed his thumbnail into the wooden table top, scratching at it. “It… ended?” he said, sounding unsure. “During the dream, I mean. I could breathe, again—that’s what woke me up. It’s never happened that way before.”

It wasn’t much to go on. “Nothing else?” Remus asked.

There was a long pause. Sirius stared out the window, expression distant. “I think,” he hesitated. “I think there was someone else there.”

///

It was a woman, a shifting blur of shadow and a long slick of white hair. “I have caused you some distress, I think,” she said.

A seeping warmth was moving through Sirius, bolstering his strength and clearing the fog from his thoughts. He scrambled to his feet, reluctant to lie prone before such a figure. She was tall, much taller than Sirius, and unnatural in her proportions. Her eyes were deep, black pools and there was something not quite right about her jaw. Sirius’ last solid memory was of the Department of Mysteries, and of anything that came afterward his entire being flinched away from. “I. I died.” He said.

“You came very close,” she said. She did not move as a person might. In fact, her mouth did not appear to move at all as she spoke. “The Veil nearly claimed you.”

Sirius had been ready to bet that it had. “Why— why didn’t it?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I could not allow it.” She came closer, gliding over the ground between them. Sirius held himself absolutely still as she reached out with black-tipped fingers to stroke his cheek. “It was great work, to lift you out of time. It has tested me nearly to my limits.”

“Out of _time_?” he asked, all other concerns momentarily forgotten. “Where am I?”

“We are in your childhood,” she said. “It is your sixteenth year. It took me some time to escape the pull of the Veil, but I believe going forward will prove easier.”

“Through _time_ ,” Sirius felt it stood repeating.

She did not acknowledge him. “I have allowed you to recover somewhat, but we must move on soon. The journey should be easier, but the longer we remain here the more tangled our web becomes. Your self that resides here has been shunted forward. He will provide an adequate place marker, but we must leave presently.”

“To where?” he asked. “Where are we going?” The bolstering strength of earlier was already depleted and he felt hopelessly muddled.

“We are returning you to your life, Sirius Black.” She held out her arm, “If you will accompany me.”

He placed his hand on her elbow. “Lead the way,” he said, braver than he felt.

///

The sun had risen behind the clouds, and a dim daylight illuminated the kitchen. Remus laid out the last of the breakfast things then went to the cold box to retrieve the marmalade. As he took it down from the shelf there was a sudden noise of distress from behind him.

“Moony, I—“ Sirius was clutching his throat, taking short, ragged breaths in and fast, wheezing breaths out. “Something’s wrong,” he said, all on an exhale. “I can’t—“ And then he was gone.

Remus startled badly, dropping the marmalade. His adrenalin spiked. “Sirius!” he called out, as if he might be hiding in one of the cabinets. There was a strange, sticky residue of magic in the air that pressed heavily in on the room. Remus could feel that significant magic had just taken place, and that wherever Sirius had appeared from, to the best of Remus’ knowledge, he had been returned.

He searched the house to be certain. After moving from attic to cellar with no sign of anyone’s habitation but his own he returned, solitary, to his breakfast for two. There was a knock at the kitchen door.

Illuminated by the clearing clouds was Sirius Black, six weeks dead. Time worn and smiling, wearing the robes he had fallen through the Veil in, soaked through with water. He smelled of silt, and river water, and he was terrifyingly, painfully alive.

“Padfoot,” Remus said.

Sirius looked past him, to the breakfast set for two. He smiled. “Expecting company, Moony?”

Remus led him inside.


End file.
